The other captain was sentenced in September to five and a half years.Continue reading
The verdict in the Hableány disaster compensation case has been reached, with the court awarding HUF 1.8 billion (EUR 4.6 million) out of the HUF 4.3 billion (EUR 10.9 million) total claims submitted. There is a wide variation in compensation, with amounts ranging from HUF 5 million to HUF 80 million (EUR 12,719 – 203,520), reports Index.
In May 2019, the tourist ship Hableány was sunk by the hotel ship Viking Sigyn, with 35 people on board. The accident killed 27 people and one South Korean passenger is still missing. Viking Sigyn‘s captain, Yuri C., has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison and banned from driving for six years. The captain of the Viking Sigyn‘s sister ship, the Viking Idun, Topal F., continues to plead not guilty to a charge of “failure to assist,” claiming that although the two ships were almost side by side, he did not see the tragedy occur.
The wreck of Hableány, lifted from the river bed, hangs on the straps of the floating crane in 2019. Photo via wikimedia.org.
According to HVG, the court described the accident as a “tragedy beyond human scale,” which is why it decided to
award HUF 1.82 billion out of a total of HUF 4.3 billion for 78 claims.
In four cases, the court did not consider the claim to be legitimate at all, while in the other 74 cases the families of the victims are entitled to compensation between HUF 5 million and HUF 80 million. The judge pointed out that
compensation is not about the monetary value of human lives, but about the remuneration due under the legislation in effect on the basis of the harm suffered.
Viking Cruises AG and Panorama Deck have just 15 days to pay the staggering compensation.
Viking‘s lawyers argued that the Hableány would have had a duty to avoid the Viking Sigynn, but the judge said that this did not give Viking Sigynn the right to “sail as if there was no smaller ship in front of it and run it over.” However, according to the judge, the Hableány was “unseaworthy” on the fateful night, as there was one less sailor on board and the “more eyes the better” principle could have led to a different Danube cruise.
The Viking Idun‘s (sailing in the close proximity of the Viking Sigyn) role was defined by the court as one that, like the other ships in the area, should have assisted in the rescue at the scene of the accident. The South Korean families also argued that the Korean family model is different from the Hungarian one – because the family is larger and there is a much closer relationship between the members – but the court did not take this into account when awarding compensation.
Via Index; Featured image via Facebook/BRFK Budapesti Rendőr-főkapitányság